CutyCapt

CutyCapt is a small cross-platform command-line utility to capture WebKit's rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and bitmap formats, including SVG, PDF, PS, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and BMP. See IECapt for a similar tool based on Internet Explorer.

Samples

Here are some samples of CutyCapt generated renderings:

• PNG Snapshot of http://digg.com
• PNG Snapshot of http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/209/209.css&page=0
• SVG Snapshot of http://silverlight.net
• PDF Snapshot of http://silverlight.net

Status

CutyCapt has a number of known quirks, most of which are caused by problems with Qt and/or WebKit. For example, while plugin support can be enabled, and the plugins execute properly, their rendering cannot be captured on some platforms. Use of with caution.

Requirements

CutyCapt depends on Qt 4.4.0+.

Download

Help wanted! Previously I have used MinGW to make a static Qt build and correspondingly single-file CutyCapt executables for Windows.
However, MinGW no longer supports single-file executables for threaded applications, they require to re-distribute a DLL instead, and Qt no longer supports
static builds of QtWebkit. Similarily, if I just used Visual Studio 2010, as I do for normal development, proper builds would have to redistribute Microsoft
runtime DLLs. Anyone who wants to prepare CutyCapt.exe + *.DLL builds is most welcome to join the project to do so, or alternatively provide them externally
which I would then link from here. Let me know if you are interested. Thanks.

• CutyCapt-Win32-2010-04-26.zip (7MB, .exe for Win32 systems)
• CutyCapt-Win32-2008-06-11.zip (6MB, .exe for Win32 systems)

Source code

The source code is available in the SVN repositorty (download tarball).

Usage

Open a command prompt and ask for help:

 % CutyCapt --help
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Usage: CutyCapt --url=http://www.example.org/ --out=localfile.png
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  --help                         Print this help page and exit
  --url=<url>                    The URL to capture (http:...|file:...|...)
  --out=<path>                   The target file (.png|pdf|ps|svg|jpeg|...)
  --out-format=<f>               Like extension in --out, overrides heuristic
  --min-width=<int>              Minimal width for the image (default: 800)
  --min-height=<int>             Minimal height for the image (default: 600)
  --max-wait=<ms>                Don't wait more than (default: 90000, inf: 0)
  --delay=<ms>                   After successful load, wait (default: 0)
  --user-styles=<url>            Location of user style sheet, if any
  --header=<name>:<value>        request header; repeatable; some can't be set
  --method=<get|post|put>        Specifies the request method (default: get)
  --body-string=<string>         Unencoded request body (default: none)
  --body-base64=<base64>         Base64-encoded request body (default: none)
  --app-name=<name>              appName used in User-Agent; default is none
  --app-version=<version>        appVers used in User-Agent; default is none
  --user-agent=<string>          Override the User-Agent header Qt would set
  --javascript=<on|off>          JavaScript execution (default: on)
  --java=<on|off>                Java execution (default: unknown)
  --plugins=<on|off>             Plugin execution (default: unknown)
  --private-browsing=<on|off>    Private browsing (default: unknown)
  --auto-load-images=<on|off>    Automatic image loading (default: on)
  --js-can-open-windows=<on|off> Script can open windows? (default: unknown)
  --js-can-access-clipboard=<on|off> Script clipboard privs (default: unknown)
  --print-backgrounds=<on|off>   Backgrounds in PDF/PS output (default: off)
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  <f> is svg,ps,pdf,itext,html,rtree,png,jpeg,mng,tiff,gif,bmp,ppm,xbm,xpm
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 http://cutycapt.sf.net - (c) 2003-2010 Bjoern Hoehrmann - bjoern@hoehrmann.de

Build Instructions

If your system is set up to compile Qt applications, building CutyCapt should be a simple matter of checking out the source code and running qmake and your version of make. As an example, if you are running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and have configured the system to use packages from hardy-backports, the following should do:

  % sudo apt-get install subversion libqt4-webkit libqt4-dev g++
  % svn co https://cutycapt.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cutycapt
  % cd cutycapt/CutyCapt
  % qmake
  % make
  % ./CutyCapt --url=http://www.example.org --out=example.png

Using CutyCapt without X server

You cannot use CutyCapt without an X server, but you can use e.g. Xvfb as light-weight server if you are not running an interactive graphical desktop environment. For example, you could use:

  % xvfb-run --server-args="-screen 0, 1024x768x24" ./CutyCapt --url=... --out=...